After Jatra launched in June 2024, I found my first customers on Reddit. Founders, solopreneurs and small business owners who wanted a community. They signed up, set things up, and told me they loved the product.
Then most of them left after five or six months.
When I asked why, the answer was almost always the same: "This community is not growing, and I'm not able to spend any time on it." They didn't have a problem with the software. They had nobody to run the community.
That churn taught me more than anything else in Jatra's first year. So before you compare platforms, answer one question: who is going to run this thing every week? I'll go through the options I've seen work and the ones I've seen fail.
A community needs someone who shows up
When I started CrazyEngineers in 2005, I had a full-time job as a QA engineer. I'd spend about eight hours at the office, walk home, have dinner, go for a long walk, and then spend four to five hours every night posting, replying and building content.
What turned visitors into contributors wasn't a feature. They saw me active all the time, replying to their comments, and they started taking note. Members follow a visibly active owner.
That's the job, and it doesn't go away when you buy software. Someone has to start discussions, answer the first questions, welcome new people, clean up spam and nudge the quiet regulars. In the first six months, that's a few hours a week at the very least.
Your job is to name that person before you launch. Not "the team". A person.
Doing it yourself
This is how almost every community I know started, including mine. It works when the founder actually enjoys it. I wasn't building a business back then. I was having fun, and when you're having fun, you don't feel the effort.
It fails when the community is one more item on a founder's list. That was exactly what happened to my early Jatra customers. Our very first customer was a startup building a community for traders. I worked closely with them, but they couldn't keep the community going alongside everything else, and it ended after about six months.
Be honest with yourself. If you can't give it a few hours every week for six months, don't start alone.
Hiring a community manager
If you're a funded startup or a business with steady revenue, a dedicated person is the most reliable option. One person who owns the community, knows the product and has time for it every single day.
The catch is that one person can't answer every product question. At Gumlet, where I ran growth, the community only turned around when everyone helped. We put community prompts throughout the website and product dashboard, made the community the first place to ask a question, pointed support emails there, and every employee answered questions quickly. Traffic went from zero to about 2,000 visitors a month. Gumlet wrote about it in the story of community turnaround.
So hire the person, but make answering in the community part of everyone's job. Support, product and engineering included.
Volunteer moderators
Volunteers are wonderful, but they come later. You can't recruit volunteers into an empty room.
At CrazyEngineers, the first moderator was my sister. Then came Ash from Malaysia, Maro from Egypt and Harshad from Surat, all early members I had never met. Nobody was paid. They were already spending their time there, I trusted them, so I asked whether they'd like moderation powers. They said yes happily. Because they lived in different time zones, the forum was moderated around the clock, even while I was at the office.
We announced every new moderator publicly and praised members inside the community all the time. That recognition is what volunteers get in return. Don't skip it.
Tip: Pick your moderators from the people who already answer the most questions. Never from the people who ask for the title.
Give them clear rules to enforce. If you don't have written guidelines yet, the free community guidelines generator gives you a starting draft in a few minutes.
Getting outside help
This is what I changed at Jatra after the churn. By mid-2025 it was clear that building a community needed real support, not just software. So we raised our prices and changed who we serve: businesses with at least one person to look after the community, or businesses that want us to help build it with them.
Today our managed plans include setup, content research and strategy, and working sessions with us through the first months, and we handle the migration if you're coming from another platform. The aim is to take a community from zero to momentum. You can see what's included on the pricing page.
Outside help, from us or anyone else, doesn't replace an owner on your side. It gets you through the cold start faster. Someone in your company still has to care.
Pick one before you pick a platform
Here's how I'd decide.
- If you're a founder with a few hours a week and real enthusiasm for the topic, do it yourself and start small, even in a free chat app.
- If you have revenue or funding and customers asking questions every day, hire or assign a community owner, and make answering part of everyone's job.
- If you want the community to grow but nobody on the team has done it before, get outside help for the first six months while your owner learns.
- Bring in volunteer moderators once regulars are already showing up. Not before.
If none of these fit right now, wait. An empty community on a paid platform is worse than no community at all.
Next steps
Not sure you're ready? The readiness guide walks through it, and the business case guide helps you get budget for the person who'll run it. Once you've named that person, the 90-day launch plan and how to seed a community tell them what to do first.
Want a second opinion? Book a 30-minute call and tell me who's going to run your community. I'll tell you honestly whether it's enough.
